‘Facebook rapist’ jailed for NSW attacks

A NSW man has been jailed for at least 30 years after befriending teenage girls and young women on Facebook and other social media sites and then sexually assaulting them.

Andrew James Benn, 29, raped or indecently assaulted 14 teenagers and young women he met on social media, including Facebook, Tinder and Snapchat, between September 2012 and January 2017.

Newcastle District Court judge Roy Ellis on Thursday jailed Benn – who’d pleaded guilty to 33 charges including 21 counts of sexual intercourse without consent – for a total of 40 years with a non-parole period of 30 years.

Judge Ellis said the way a “depraved” Benn had treated his victims was “nothing short of despicable”. The judge described his enormous criminality as “evil”.

Benn would trawl through personal Facebook pages of random young women in the NSW Hunter region searching for victims and sending them friend requests.

After befriending them, Benn would gain their confidence, and then arrange to meet in person before attacking them.

In one case, Benn, from Rothbury in the Hunter Valley, sent a Facebook friend request to a 17-year-old girl in November 2013 and spent weeks chatting to her online until he convinced the teenager to meet him.

The year 11 student told Benn she’d never been on a date before. She thought he was going to drive her into Newcastle but, instead, he took her to a boat ramp at Morpeth in Maitland and raped her in the back seat.

Benn then drove the terrified girl to the Morpeth cemetery where he raped her again.

In an emotional victim impact statement read to the court, the woman revealed she’d been ashamed of what Benn had done to her.

At the time she felt she couldn’t tell anyone about being raped – including her mother.

“I was still in shock. I was worried about how my mother would react,” the woman told the court on Thursday.

She suffered panic attacks, nightmares and flashbacks after the attack and subsequently failed year 11. She didn’t return to school.

Another victim told the court she hated herself every day because she froze when Benn attacked her and didn’t fight back.

Benn was arrested in January 2017 after two teenage girls and three women aged between 16 and 20 contacted police to report he’d sexually assaulted them.

A further nine victims came forward following publicity about his arrest.

A FORMER Hunter Marist Brother who called a 12-year-old student ‘‘the anti-Christ’’ before raping him half a century ago is in custody after pleading guilty to sexually abusing 17 boys and teenagers, and being found guilty of offences against two others.

Trials against Francis William Cable, 82, known as Brother Romuald when he taught at Marist Brothers schools at Hamilton, Maitland and Pagewood in the 1960s, were expected to run for several months after he pleaded not guilty to nearly 60 indecent assault and buggery offences in the 1960s and 1970s.

But he entered guilty pleas to multiple offences in Sydney District Court on Thursday after a jury in the first trial found him guilty of 13 offences against two boys, including buggery, on Tuesday.

Men cried with relief and outrage after the guilty pleas were confirmed. One victim, who was called ‘‘the anti-Christ’’, beaten on the head and digitally and orally raped by Romuald at the age of 12, cried as he said: ‘‘I don’t trust any man.’’

‘‘He was violent. He used me for sex. He was a mongrel of a bloke and I was just a child.’’

Three of his victims who cried while recounting the terror they experienced at school because of Romuald said they had no time for anyone who expressed sympathy for him because of his age, or the likelihood that he would die in jail.

‘‘He sexually abused me more than 50 years ago and I’ve had to live with that for most of my life,’’ said one of his former students, 67.

‘‘He’s been able to live his life without anyone knowing what he did. He probably thought that at 82, ‘I’m fine. I’ll get away with this’, but that’s not right. Child sexual abuse has a devastating impact on your life. It doesn’t matter how old you are, or how old they are, the silence that allowed this to happen has to end.’’

Romuald sexually abused a number of children who had suffered deaths in their families, or where family members were known drinkers, or where the children had physical problems.

He sexually abused children behind his desk in classrooms at Maitland, Hamilton and Pagewood while other students were in the room. He gained access to boys and teenagers outside school by coaching sports, taking them on Duke of Edinburgh Award camps and activities, running army cadet groups, and organising father-and-son weekend camps where the fathers brought kegs of beer.

At one of the father-and-son weekends, Romuald indecently assaulted a 13-year-old boy while they were swimming in Myall Lakes.

An agreed statement of facts tendered to the court said the boy told his father on the trip home.

‘‘His father did not believe him and told him he was lying,’’ the facts said.

Romuald committed multiple offences at Newcastle, Merewether and Maitland baths, and Heffron Park baths in Sydney while swimming with boys and teenagers.

Other offences occurred at Bar Beach, also while swimming.

In 1972 Romuald took a form 2 Hamilton Marist Brothers class to Merewether Baths, where they used the change rooms.

‘‘The offender was walking around in the change rooms with an erection. He was encouraging the boys to remove their clothes, telling them to take their swimmers off,’’ the statement of facts said.

Romuald indecently assaulted boys at the Hamilton and Maitland schools while teaching them sex education, which he taught in one-on-one sessions. He also befriended women who were alone because their husbands had died, or left, or worked for long periods away from home, and indecently assaulted their sons during regular visits.

Romuald indecently assaulted one boy in his mother’s laundry, telling him it was ‘‘sex education’’.

One of his victims, 58, said his life had ‘‘gone completely pear-shaped’’ because of the abuse he experienced at Hamilton Marist Brothers.

‘‘I was going to be an engineer but after the abuse I just couldn’t stay at school. I got out,’’ he said.

‘‘I hate the Marist Brothers. I can’t understand how they did all that stuff. The Brothers at that school were friends of my parents. I look back and see what a mess my life has been and I realise, I was running away.’’

Francis Cable (Brother Romuald) will be sentenced at a later date.

‘He’s an old man, he can’t hurt me any more’

A MAN sobbed on Thursday when told he would not have to give evidence against Francis William Cable, the man he knew as Brother Romuald at Marist Brothers Hamilton.

‘‘I feel cheated,’’ he said, while apologising for not being able to control his sobs.

‘‘I’ve lost my chance to say: ‘You hurt me’. I’m really beaten up. I’ve got to get this bear off my back because it’s been 40 bloody years.’’

The man was 13 when Romuald repeatedly indecently assaulted him in class, and left him terrified of when the next incident would occur.

‘‘For all this time, I’ve pictured myself as three feet tall, and he’s six feet four, and I’m powerless. I need to look at his face and know he’s a bent-up old man and he can’t hurt me any more. I need to be able to tell him that: ‘You can’t hurt me any more’.’’

The man, who cannot be identified, said Romuald was a ‘‘big, evil, scary man who used to turn up out of nowhere’’ for many former students.

‘‘There are more victims … who wouldn’t make statements to police. I personally approached four. They said he had abused them but they just couldn’t make a statement. That’s the power this stuff has over you.

‘‘You cap it and seal it away and think you’re OK, and then it hits you.’’

The man said his family had not supported him. When he rang them in distress after the guilty pleas on Thursday, his parents tried to change the subject.

Another victim who was 13 when he was repeatedly assaulted by Romuald said he was staggered by the failings of the Catholic Church and the Marist Brothers to protect children at the Hamilton and Maitland schools.

11-year sentence for pedophile Roger Keith Onslow

By STEPHEN RYAN

Oct. 31, 2014, 9:30 p.m.

A SEXUAL predator who preyed on boys for almost three decades was jailed for 11 years and six months on Friday after a judge described him as a ‘‘deviant’’ who led a ‘‘morally bankrupt and criminal lifestyle’’.

Roger Keith Onslow, 53, began grooming and isolating boys for sexual activity as a young man in 1983 before he was arrested at Maitland last year at what he hoped was going to be a meeting with a 13-year-old boy, Newcastle District Court heard.

Instead, Onslow was met by police who had been investigating an online predator called the Artful Dodger who had been grooming a boy for sex.

Onslow displayed little emotion after Judge Helen Wilson sentenced him to a minimum of eight years and seven months’ jail with the non-parole period expiring in February 2023.

She detailed how Onslow, a software developer, cultivated relationships with friends, families and neighbours in the 1980s and 1990s to target four boys for sex.

His offending ranged from touching to sex acts and an attempted rape at locations in the Coalfields, Lake Macquarie, Newcastle and Sydney.

He took some of his victims on trips and would sometimes enter their bedrooms as they tried to sleep.

Onslow previously pleaded guilty to 23 charges, while other offences were also taken into account. Judge Wilson noted that a psychiatrist believed that Onslow had little insight into his offending, which he referred to as ‘‘expressions of love and affection’’.

The psychiatrist rated Onslow a moderate to high risk of re-offending, while Judge Wilson said Onslow ‘‘may only have a superficial comprehension of his crimes’’.

Police found almost 1700 images and 70 videos of child abuse material in Onslow’s Abermain home.

The material was ‘‘abhorrent’’ and ‘‘highly disturbing’’, including acts of sadism and bestiality involving babies and toddlers, Judge Wilson said.

In his chats with what he hoped was a 13-year-old boy, Onslow progressed from talking about hugs and kisses to discussing showering together and eating and licking food off each other.

Ryan has been given a 15 month suspended sentence after pleaded guilty to acts of gross indecency & attempting sexual intercourse with a boy at a church in Gresford near Dungog when he was the parish priest. Another four charges were dropped. His victims were aged between 6 & 14.

Paedophile priest victims decry defrocking ‘tokenism’

The Catholic Church has been accused of tokenism after defrocking notorious Hunter paedophile priest John Denham while failing to defrock other clergy child sex abusers.

“They get rid of the worst of the worst to make it look like they’re cleaning up their act, but they’re picking and choosing,” said a Newcastle victim of Vince Ryan, who was jailed after sexually abusing 35 boys between 1972 and 1991, and released last year.

“I asked [Bishop] Michael Malone to defrock Ryan back when he was jailed [in 1996] and Malone said they wouldn’t. So why did they do it with Denham?”

Maitland-Newcastle Bishop William Wright’s announcement on Sunday that Pope Benedict laicised (defrocked) Denham in May, after a recommendation from former Bishop Malone, met with a mixed response from victims of Hunter paedophile priests and their families.

Several people contacted by the Newcastle Herald agreed with Bishop Malone’s argument that the church was responsible for its paedophile priests, while defrocking made them the community’s responsibility.

In the case of Vince Ryan, the church and the priest signed a formal document in which he agreed not to return to the Hunter region. The condition was at the request of some Ryan victims. The church agreed to support the priest during his lengthy parole in Sydney.

His Newcastle victim said it was offensive that someone like Ryan could still call himself a priest, despite the church stripping him of his right to act as a priest.

Denis McAlinden, who the church tried to secretly defrock in 1995 over sexual abuse of young girls, continued to act as a priest despite being stripped of his right to do so in 1993.

Peter Gogarty, a victim of Jim Fletcher, called the defrocking of Denham “tokenism”, and his sexual abuser’s right to call himself “Father” until the day he died a repeat of the abuse.

“He’s buried as Father Jim Fletcher. That’s what’s wrong with the argument put forward in the Vince Ryan case. He can still call himself a priest,” he said.

It is extremely rare for the church in Australia to defrock clergy sex abusers.